Friends

I have been writing about green things only rarely lately, yet my inbox is overflowing with press releases from companies seeking coverage in time for Earth Day. I actually read a few of these alerts this morning. Among the pressing news:

Bacardi is cutting the ribbon on Puerto Rico's largest wind installation at its rum distillery (Sounds great. Plane ticket?).

Shortly after President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize this morning, fellow laureate Al Gore spoke about the triple threats of climate change, an unraveled economy and global (in)security.

I shoved my point-and-shoot Canon at him--well, from a polite distance--in the second row of a packed crowd at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Madison, Wis.

I wanted to ask him, "Hey, where are all the green jobs?! Where's our green WPA? What would you do as president here?" Alas, other folks beat me to the microphone. (Is it worth noting that some of their questions were inane to the point of eliciting jeers from the audience? One fellow had the mic turned off and yanked from his face.)

I was hoping that Gore or some other journalist would read my mind and bring up the subject of all those green jobs that are supposed to glow on the happy horizon, but the answers to my questions remain up in the air.

Some 15 million Americans remain unemployed, among them (perhaps scores of) laid-off journalists in the room. It's been sobering during the SEJ conference to run across some of the nation's finest environmental reporters living on unemployment benefits.

Which clean technologies does the former vice president think hold the most promise? Is Gore a bore or are we a society of ADHD-riddled bimbos who fail to pay attention to well-reasoned warnings at our peril?

Wow, who knew that the Environmental Protection Agency is in the
business of protecting the environment? That's due in no small part to Obama's installation of the agency's new administrator, Lisa Jackson (above).

She received standing ovations two Thursdays ago at a National Press Club event touting a two-hour Frontline documentary Poisoned Waters, which explores pollution in the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound. She
seems like a down to earth straight talker, mentioning offhand how her
mother lost a New Orleans home to Hurricane Katrina.

What's killing U.S. waterways? Farms and storms, to oversimplify it. Industrial agriculture washes pesticides into waterways, spawning six-legged
frogs and fish with freakish man-eggs. Rain rinses the
toxicants of the built environment off the sides of
buildings on down into sewage systems and into the ground, contaminating interconnected streams, rivers, lakes, ponds, oceans.

Poisons are ubiquitous in consumer products, so who's to blame? All of us, not just the bad practices of big businesses, most of whom have
long been bound by EPA restrictions. How can we improve stewardship
enough to clean up our habits and our water? Frontline producer Hendrick Smith wondered if it's possible to regulate the mass use of industrial poisons in a democracy.

"Pollutants are still responsible for pollution," Jackson said, insisting that the EPA needs
a law to help determine whether local folks or feds are responsible for
particular waterways, which cross jurisdictions. Assigning
responsibility for cleanup in any case eats 40 to 60 percent of the
agency's time, she said. (Good luck. "There should be a law," often draws applause
in this town.)

Improving the health of water resources is "only gonna happen if people believe the way they act and
behave is integral to the preservation of the rest of life and with
other living things," said Bill Ruckelshaus (below), in 1970 the first EPA head. A cultural shift must accompany any lasting political solutions, he added.

Ruckelshaus noted that there's already been a cultural shift since Nixonvetoed the Clean Water Act, which Congress then protected. He touted how the EPA has cleaned up the air, such as by ending the burning of soft coal for heat in major cities. "We had the people of Denver who wanted to see mountains again, and the people of Los Angeles who wanted to see one another," he said. "It's not as though we haven't done anything."

It's been more than 5 years since I was in D.C., and the mood on the street is palpably different. Despite our great recession, ordinary folks like cab drivers and hot dog vendors flanking the Smithsonian museums seem peppier than at the height of the G.W. Bush era. Maybe it's just springtime, which often feels tulip-tinted, but I'm not alone in this observation. A Bloomberg reporter I met at a wine bar said it's like Bambi has arrived in town, with birds alighting on the shoulders of so many regular D.C. residents.

Contrary to expectations, I actually made it to Burning Man this year. You can check out some of the damage here. Despite so many good intentions and the hard work of many burners, Green Man was no Las Vegas, but it wasn't so green. Then again, what is? For me, the least green aspect was losing my shirt--not literally, but figuratively, in advance of the event, by shopping at Target and about four other big-box stores for a tent, cooler, LED lights for the bike, and so many other overpackaged, phthalate-ridden camping products. (I felt less crazy after a new artist friend admitted that she, too, nearly cries in such emporia. Oh, the humanity.) I didn't realize that the last time I used my own tent was for post-high school graduation bacchanalia on the beach. Because I decided to go at the last minute, I didn't have the luxury of collecting these things slowly and sustainably from friends, craigslist, or resale shops.

My petroleum-based "powdered" wig had to be new too. Or maybe the least green aspect was supplying gasoline to the theme camp's generators. Oh wait, that five gallons was nothing compared to the gasoline filling up the rental car. While I hate air conditioning in real life, some of my happiest Black Rock moments were of resting inside of other people's freon-cooled RVs and trucks for several hours during withering mid-day desert heat.

But I congratulate myself, as any self-righteous San Franciscan should, for spending $25 on a bucket of biodegradable, organic lavender handi-wipes, a hot item under the hotter sun. I brought a bottle of rosewater to spritz on dried-out compatriots too. The bottle claimed that people had prayed over it, and that it possessed special magnetic properties, but my failure to cover up the label made me feel as if I were advertising, a big burner no-no that may have demagnetized all that energy.

And despite the rush to shop at the last minute, the Alemany flea market the week before the burn was the best source of sustainable gifts. I bought a hat box worth of hand-embroidered, mid-century handkerchiefs, which my grandmother still requests at holidays, and passed them around to people. The least commercial, big tent aspect of the Burning Man experience was stopping at local shops and "Indian" taco stands on the way in and out of Black Rock, and sharing small talk with some Paiutepeople. Pyramid Lake is the bluest thing I've ever seen, especially after nearly a week of so much burning of the brain and fossil fuels.

In Florida last month, I reluctantly agreed to the Gator Tour. Please don't tell anyone. It really wasn't my idea. Just ask Tracy; I was tricked into this trip. But OK, I'll admit that I love the name of Miami Nice Tours, which take you to the Everglades.

"Don't you want to see it before it's gone?" my mom pleaded.

In the bus ride from the chain of downtown hotels in that construction zone called Miami, it was obvious how urban sprawl is eating up the Everglades. White fences low to the ground abut swampy waterways. That didn't stop some hungry alligator from getting in the yard of one homeowner last year, who unintentionally fed himself to the reptile (so the bus driver said).

The tour of a corner of the endangered Everglades is done by air boat, a noisy thing with a giant fan in back. Earplugs are included. Everyone in the boat stands up, gawks, and snaps shots when the guide calls out . I wished we had the grizzled guide behind us, whose voice sounded like a buzzsaw. But our guide was friendly enough. He talked a bit about conservation, regaled us with the wonders of the 3,000 teeth (I bought a pack of 12--but these as well as gator meat and leather come only from our farmed friends) an alligator may grow over its lifetime, and wondered if we had any questions. There was barely a peep back, so I made a peep.

"Can't they run these things with diesel engines, and run them on biofuel, so they don't pollute the ecosystem?"

That would make the boats too heavy, he said.

"Um, really? I doubt it."

Uncomfortable silence.

"How many tours are there on average?" I continued.

Some 50 each day.

I imagined alligators and egrets gulping the rainbow swirls of gasoline left by the busy air boats. But I hope I didn't offend the tour guide. The other boat passengers studiously avoided me, or maybe I'm imagining that.

Update: Admit it, I may be the foolish-looking one for doubting the boat would be too heavy for a bigger engine, now that an air boat overturned last week and dumped tourists into the Everglades. But no reptile snacks became of them.

So take that, Gordon Gekko--er, Ivan Boesky. I poked around the Cleantech Forum a bit this week. Lots of gray and navy blue suits there, with few of the jeans-and-polos found at dot-com dealmaking events, but it was relatively laid back nevertheless when you consider all the money-matchmaking involved. The $3.6 billion poured into the emerging clean tech sector in 2006 is twice the 2004 amount for North America and Europe. There are billions and billions of dollars just waiting to anoint the next clean, green, money-making machine. Startup CEOs and scientists were snapping wishbones, crossing fingers, trading cards.

Want to gobble up clean stocks? Be on the lookout for the IPO of some yet-unpopular, cleantech cousin of Google! But which company will it be? One that can print thin-film solar panels? A large-scale maker of biofuel blends? A startup that's making LED bulbs cheaper?

I wandered around some booths and learned about Group IV Semiconductor, backed by $10 million and working to make silicon-based,
energy-efficient LED lightbulbs that might sell for a mere $3 a pop by
2010. Cheaper, white LED bulbs could be the holy grail of bright, low-energy lighting. SpringStar is working to get rid of things that bug you without pesticides with gizmos that mimic insects' mating calls and perfumes. However, there's no bedbug treatment yet because mimicking their stinky pheromones would make your boudoir smell pretty skanky. Engineers at Lawrence Berkeley Labs are building air quality sensors that they hope they can shrink to fit in or on cell phones. Here's more show-and-tell.

In the adjoining rooms, each panel seemed to be running nearly an hour late. At a talk about corporate market drivers, Ali Iz of G.E. said his company has been snapping up great money-making green businesses, but it needs to figure out how to support innovation that's not yet profitable without spending hundreds of millions of dollars.

PG&E, the villain of Erin Brokovich, has greened nearly every bus station in San Francisco with ads for its eco-friendly efforts in recent months. During the Cleantech Forum, PG&E let loose that it's donating a year of office space to hot startups Adura Technologies (makes wireless lighting sensors)
and GreenVolts (working on cheaper, more concentrated solar panels). I planned to make it to the mayor's announcement about launching a cleantech S.F. business campus near the former PG&E plant, but I was interrupted by friends who were wine tasting a block away. Cabbing it home two champagne flutes later, there was no hybrid to flag down. But that could change soon too.

What's next? If you're dying to get rich off of companies built to keep the planet from dying, then scroll down and look in the left column for my updated "Green Money" links of lots of cleantech-related blogs. The tickers at Sustainable Business can be useful too.

On another note, Apple's ad campaign for its latest invention is ripping off Christian billboards circa 1999. Can God sue?

Look at my footage below: the oglers at Macworld are venerating the new iPhone as if tears and blood were streaming from its Magic Touch screen, imparting a telepathic message of eternal life and everlasting forgiveness. Instead, the gadget comes with a mortal battery, it demands a contract with a devilish telecom, and nobody's even touched it. Get real, people. It's a phone...oh yeah, and a music player and an "breakthrough Internet communications device." It can't feed or clothe you or detoxify your drinking water. Before I leave this earth, maybe I'll see a crowd like this one oohing and ahhing and elbowing over some new invention that actually helps people and the planet.

I stopped by the WorldChanging party in San Francisco last week. Guess what? It was in the same spot as the Grist party, where the Zipcar party was also held. 111 Minna must love its monopoly on the green parties.

The WorldChanging blog--now with city-specific editions--is also a newish book. Its fans (which likely means you, if you've found this blog) hope that this do-it-yourself guide to a sustainable 21st century will be on your holiday gift and wish lists. They even hacked Amazon to make WorldChanging the 12th most popular book for a little while last month. I bought one in Vermont (before it went on sale, eek).

The book is beautifully designed and comes inside of a box with little holes punched in it. The perforations emanate from an image of a cardinal, so it seems to sing or shine. WorldChanging maestro Alex Steffen explained the secret behind the holes: the more you keep the box out in the open, the more light will seep through each aperture, gradually bleaching the book underneath in the same dotty pattern. Therefore, come summertime, you'll be able to see whether your giftees are really living by the present you intended as a manual for greening their lives. Pop quiz in June?

I really need to bring along a working camera more when I go places. At a Google party last week, I got to check out a prototype of the famous $100 Linux laptop, being designed with poor kids around the world in mind. Cute? But all I have to show for it is a faint chardonnay stain on my t-shirt from balancing the wine glass in one hand and the hand-crankable gizmo in the other.

Everything's coming up way too green this month, and I can't keep up. There were round-the-block lines outside the Grist party Friday night, then so many organic raspberry vodkas leading to logorrhea--and then spotting Siel (aka GreenLAGirl), David (Grist), and other nice sustainadrinkers.

I shared a taxi to the Common Vision party at Cellspace, partied up by an old school crowd--the type deemed too dredful by hesitant, would-be environmentalists these days. It was a pretty hardcore bunch, and I belonged to the combed-hair minority. Ah, ultragreen sights and scents (someone has to keep incense vendors fed). But I admit, even in my double-breasted jacket, I got into it during the nonprofit's film about its biofuel bus tour. They planted 1,000 trees in 20 cities with helping hands from schoolchildren more eager than most of us to let loose with the big drums. Imagine looking left to right and seeing reverential gazes all down the line. Been there, done...time to go.

The Raging Grannies rocked the Green Fest on Sunday. Their getup is equal parts Susan B. Anthony and Medea Benjamin, bridging the centuries with a lady punk flair: straw hats brimming with flowers and political buttons, magenta and cotton-candy hues, yellow police caution strips too. They held those MOMS (Make our Milk Safe) "Target: Phase Out PVC" signs. Looks like rocket fuel and toxic flame retardants are tasteless in breast milk. I was prepping my camera when a 50something man next to me wondered aloud about filming them: "Is it worth it? Is it worth it?" Judge yourself--here's my micro-movie (or below).

As we were rushed out of the exhibition hall to return our Zipcar in time, blurring past the LED lightbulbs, chopstick colanders, Bidematic, and Oeko-Tek-certified latex beds, I said hey to Summer of BTC Elements--who was still selling a cute cashmere sweater and was one of the few, unwilting souls still holding down a booth past 6pm.

It's Monday Tuesday already and my solar cells are sapped, so I couldn't hang around after work to hear Darryl Hannah talk about food at the Commonwealth Club or to crash the Zipcar party down the street at 111 Minna (same watering hole for Grist, il y a 3 nights). Good night~